We will compare the new card with the dual-processor solutions AMD Radeon HD 7990 2x3GB and Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 2x2GB working at their default clock rates.

We will also include the two fastest single-processor cards AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB (at its default clock rates) and Zotac GeForce GTX Titan Black 6GB (at the default clock rates and in overclocked mode).

The Zotac is overclocked to 1064-1155/8120 MHz. It is priced like the dual-processor Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 ($999), so we want to know if the current single-processor flagship can catch up with the dual-processor flagship card of the previous generation. The Power Limit is set at its maximum for each graphics card.

In order to lower the dependence of the graphics cards’ performance on the overall platform speed, we overclocked our 32nm six-core CPU to 4.8 GHz by setting its frequency multiplier at x48 and enabling Load-Line Calibration. The CPU voltage was increased to 1.385 volts in the mainboard’s BIOS.

Hyper-Threading was turned on. We used 32 GB of system memory at 2.133 GHz with timings of 9-11-11-20_CR1 and voltage of 1.6125 volts.

The testbed ran Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 with all critical updates installed. We used the following drivers:

Intel Chipset Drivers – 9.4.4.1006 WHQL dated 21.09.2013

DirectX End-User Runtimes, dated 30 November 2010

AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta (14.100.0.0) dated 27.05.2014

Nvidia GeForce 337.88 WHQL dated 26.05.2014

We benchmarked the graphics cards’ performance at two display resolutions: 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 pixels. There were two visual quality modes: “Quality+AF16x” means the default texturing quality in the drivers + 16x anisotropic filtering whereas “Quality+ AF16x+MSAA 4x(8x)” means 16x anisotropic filtering and 4x or 8x antialiasing. In some games we use antialiasing algorithms other than MSAA as indicated below and in the diagrams. We enabled anisotropic filtering and full-screen antialiasing from the game’s menu. If the corresponding options were missing, we changed these settings in the Control Panels of the Catalyst and GeForce drivers. We also disabled V-Sync there. There were no other changes in the driver settings.

The graphics cards were tested in two benchmarks and 14 games updated to the latest versions.

BioShock Infinite (DirectX 11) version 1.1.25.5165: we used Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool with “Ultra” and “Ultra+DOF” quality settings, two consecutive runs of the in-game benchmark.

Metro:Last Light (DirectX 11) version 1.0.0.15: we used the built-in benchmark for two consecutive runs of the D6 scene. All image quality and tessellation settings were at “Very High”, Advanced PhysX technology enabled, with and without SSAA antialiasing.

GRID 2 (DirectX 11) version 1.0.85.8679: we used the built-in benchmark, the visual quality settings were all at their maximums, the tests were run with and without MSAA 8x antialiasing with eight cars on the Chicago track.

Company of Heroes 2 (DirectX 11) version 3.0.0.13553: two consecutive runs of the integrated benchmark at maximum image quality and physics effects settings.

Battlefield 4 (DirectX 11) – version 111433: Ultra settings, two successive runs of a scripted scene from the beginning of the “Tashgar” mission (110 seconds long), with the Mantle API enabled for AMD-based cards.

We publish the bottom frame rate for games that report it. Each test was run twice, the final result being the best of the two if they differed by less than 1%. If we had a larger difference, we reran the test at least once again to get repeatable results.